One Bin for All?

- by Melanie Scrug­gs, Texas Cam­paign for the Environment

Right now, the City of Hous­ton is expand­ing its two-bin or “sin­gle-stream” recy­cling pro­gram to final­ly cov­er all the near­ly 350,000 homes that it ser­vices. As an avid zero waster, you may be think­ing two things: 1. It is fan­tas­tic that Hous­to­ni­ans final­ly have access to a curb­side recy­cling pro­gram; and 2. It’s quite embar­rass­ing that the nation’s fourth largest city took so long to extend curb­side recy­cling city-wide. Those two thoughts are both true, but unfor­tu­nate­ly Hous­ton is con­sid­er­ing trash­ing the progress it has made by invest­ing in a boon­dog­gle project that would elim­i­nate real recy­cling altogether.

The pro­pos­al known as “One Bin for All” is a mis­guid­ed plan designed to elim­i­nate curb­side recy­cling and direct all res­i­dents to go back to putting both trash and recy­clable mate­ri­als in the same bin—hence the name—which would then be sent to a new waste facil­i­ty known as a “dirty MRF”(Mate­ri­als Recov­ery Facil­i­ty) where the recy­clable mate­ri­als would sup­pos­ed­ly be sep­a­rat­ed out after the fact. This plan has met stiff resis­tance local­ly and across the nation for the past two years, and right­ful­ly so—it’s a ter­ri­ble idea, and not a new one either. Dal­las and Austin offi­cials have con­sid­ered this pro­pos­al and reject­ed it with­in the past three years.

In Hous­ton, how­ev­er, the tech­nol­o­gy has been hailed as the “next rev­o­lu­tion of recy­cling.” Mixed sig­nals are com­ing from offi­cials in the Mayor’s Office about whether or not they actu­al­ly plan to invest in the pro­gram, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the recent and sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment in source sep­a­rat­ed recy­cling. Still, the offi­cial plan under con­sid­er­a­tion is to give every­one in the city a curb­side recy­cling bin, then take away their old garbage bins and tell res­i­dents to put all their trash and recy­clable mate­ri­als togeth­er in their nice, big, green recy­cling bin. Presto, now it’s all get­ting recy­cled thanks to the mag­ic of “One Bin for All!” But not really—in the real world, sim­i­lar pro­grams have been shown to send most of the mixed-togeth­er mate­ri­als straight to a land­fill or incinerator.

Last year Hous­ton issued a Request for Pro­pos­al and received five bids to build the new dirty MRF facil­i­ty. City offi­cials appoint­ed an Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee to review the five pro­pos­als and rec­om­mend the best one. This rec­om­men­da­tion, and then a deci­sion by the City Coun­cil itself, was orig­i­nal­ly due to take place in Decem­ber. Then, ear­ly 2015. Now city offi­cials say the deci­sion will be made by the end of the sum­mer. The com­pa­ny push­ing hard­est for this pro­pos­al, Eco­hub LLC a.k.a. Organ­ic Ener­gy Cor­po­ra­tion, claims the deci­sion has already been made—their lob­by­ist has said that city offi­cials are cur­rent­ly draft­ing a con­tract to award them the bid and start con­struc­tion on the dirty MRF. If this is true, which of the two bins do you think they will take away, as if it real­ly mattered?

City offi­cials are now say­ing the “waste to ener­gy” (bet­ter known as trash incin­er­a­tion) com­po­nent of this plan is not going to move for­ward for sev­er­al more years, so we shouldn’t wor­ry about the tox­ic air pol­lu­tion that would cre­ate. It’s as if they think res­i­dents will some­how con­fuse the words “lat­er” and “nev­er.” May­or Annise Park­er and her admin­is­tra­tion have repeat­ed­ly admon­ished crit­ics about this, claim­ing that trash-burn­ing was nev­er part of the plan at all. But the city’s offi­cial Request for Pro­pos­al doc­u­ments clear­ly include “waste to fuel” or “gasi­fi­ca­tion” tech­nolo­gies. In oth­er words, incin­er­a­tion in dis­guise. Now that they can’t hide this any­more because it’s on paper for any­one to see, their new stance is, OK, it’s there, but we promise we won’t do it for a few more years. Honest. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Hous­ton can do bet­ter. Cities in Texas, the U.S. and the world are mov­ing toward com­pre­hen­sive waste reduc­tion, recy­cling, reman­u­fac­tur­ing and com­post­ing pro­grams to divert huge per­cent­ages of their dis­cards from land­fills. Oth­er cities are reduc­ing 40%, 60%, 80% or more of their waste, with­out toss­ing every­thing into one bin and with­out using dan­ger­ous and pol­lut­ing incin­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies. Hous­ton can do that as well if we imple­ment the poli­cies and pro­grams that have proven to work. We need a com­mit­ment from city offi­cials that the progress we’re final­ly see­ing now on curb­side recy­cling won’t be used as a ploy for this bad pro­pos­al. We need true envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship and for­ward-think­ing lead­er­ship to move even the biggest, most sprawl­ing cities toward zero waste. It’s up to all Hous­ton res­i­dents and urban lead­ers across the coun­try to demand noth­ing less.